“And What Do You Say I Am?”: The Meaning of the Kentucky Display

In McCreary County v. ACLU, a bare majority of the Supreme Court affirmed that secularism is still the overriding principle of church-state law. Their “touchstone” was the “principle” which “mandates governmental neutrality between...religion and nonreligion.” But that’s actually not quite it. “Neutrality” between something and its absence—such as “religion” and “nonreligion”—would be (if it is imaginable at all) at least some of the thing. “Neutrality” between, say, a desert climate and a tropical climate would be someplace like Northern Indiana: rains here quite a bit but nothing like it does in the Amazon....